You build a website and then … fizzle. Nothing happens. The fact is what you built is a little tiny island in the great big sea called the Internet. The only way people can get to your island–or even find out that it exists–if if you (a) take them there (that’s advertising, covered earlier) or (b) you build an airport and get some airlines to fly in and out.
The airline model, transposed to the Internet world, is links. Most writers don’t understand links, and it’s a shame, because we writrs have a natural edge in linking.
Basically speaking, a link (also called a hyperlink) is one of those blue underlined words or phrases that–when clicked–magically transports you to another place. When Internet mavens speak, they talk about inbound links and outbound links. It’s the same as planes to an airport. The links from elsewhere that take people to your site are inbound links. The links on your site that take people to other sites are outbound links.
Inbound links are better.
There are two reasons you want a lot of inbound links, and one of them is intuitive. The more links on other sites that lead folks to your site (inbound links), the more likely it is that people will visit your site. It’s like setting up an airport.
There is another reason you want inbound links and this gets into the mysterious world of SEO (search engine optimization). When search engines evaluate your site to try to decide how it should appear when a person types in your keyword(s), one of the many things it looks for are inbound links. In other words, the SEO spiders (that’s what they’re called) want to know how many other sites think that your site is important. Inbound links is a bit like celebrity or popularity. Furthermore, the more important and authoritative the linker is, the better off you are.
Let’s take a medical example. The American Heart Association runs a website which is considered authoritative for the keyword heart disease and probably many other related keywords (heart attack, arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation, congenital heart disease, heart failure, etc.) Now let’s say that the American Heart Association thought that a website called “What Patients Should Know about Heart Attacks” was so important that it recommended readers check it out to learn more about heart attacks. It didn’t actually “endorse” the site in so many words, but what it did was offer a short description of the site and a hyperlink to that site.
That’s an inbound link and, furthermore, that’s about as great a link as you can get. It means a very respected, authority site like American Heart Association thought that “What Should Patients Should Know About Heart Attacks” was worth knowing. To a search engine, that American Heart Association authority link confers on your site a high degree of respect. The search engine is more likely to bump your site up in the search engine rankings because of that link.
On the other hand, if Dr. Smith’s Cardiology Clinic linked to your site, that inbound link would be great, but not as good as American Heart. And if some weird little site that nobody visited called “MakeYourOwnHat.com” linked to your site, it would be worthless. It would be worthless for two reasons: first, the site is little and weak so it doesn’t have much oomph to transfer to you. Second, and more importantly, it’s off-topic. A hat-making website endorsing a heart attack website … not a good fit.
So you want to get links. The ideal link is from an authority site–but you may not be able to swing that. The next best links are links from popular high-traffic sites. That’s where writers can win.
What you ought to do is write some articles and distribute them to ezines. There are a lot of online sources that publish articles all of the time and offer them–free or at modest cost–to members. The only catch is that publishers of these articles have to print them exactly as is.
Let’s take an example. You have a website called Over50Wedding.com and your goal is to sell all sorts of things for people getting married later in life. Now let’s say you wrote an article about the 10 most popular over-50 honeymoon destinations or how to manage blended families in a late-in-life wedding or even the ins-and-outs of the quickie Vegas wedding. These are all good topics because they sound interesting and they tie naturally back to your Over50Wedding.com site. You write the article but at the end you put a resource box where you not only say your name and a bit about yourself, you add something to mention your URL. For example:
This article was written by Lurleen Thibodeaux, who has helped plan hundreds of wedding in and around her hometown of Savannah, Georgia. To find out more ideas for late-in-life weddings, just click to Over50Weddings.com.
Now you know that I’m a marketer. You can amp that up a bit. Try this:
This article was written by Lurleen Thibodeaux, who has helped plan hundreds of wedding in and around her hometown of Savannah, Georgia. To get a free report on How to Avoid the 10 Most Common Mistakes in Later-in-Life Weddings, just go now to Over50Weddings.com. This offer only good while supplies last.
The free report would be a document that is available on your website. I admit, it’s a bribe. But it’s an ethical bribe along the lines of a “free sample.”
Where do you distribute your articles? You can first get a list of ezines by just Googling Ezines. There are some mega-sites that offer a whole roster of topics. You can also go to Google Groups (just Google) and find weddings or seniors or related topics. You can also just search “keyword”+ezine.
You give the article away. In fact, if you’re smart, you’ll give lots of them away. If they are well written and would inspire a person to click back to your website, you’re doing great.
Most websites are content-starved and most webmasters are out online all of the time trying to drum up decent content. You are there … offering free content! Now any time they put your article on their site, you get an inbound link … and you may also get people who jump on that link to visit your site.
Offering your articles to some of the mega-sites is a good idea, too, because that gives you an inbound link from a gigantic, high-traffic site.
You can also target authority sites in your niche. If you knew of some great senior site or some excellent wedding site–you might be able to offer free content to them in exchange for a link.
This strategy is a strong one and it works well if you do it consistently over the long haul. So why don’t more people do it?
They can’t write!
That’s why writers have a real edge here.
